Red Hat Improves Scalability, Simplifies Usability with Latest Version of Production-Ready OpenStack for Enterprise and Service Provider Clouds
Built on OpenStack ‘Newton’ community release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 delivers refreshed user interface, customizable roles and long lifecycle support
RALEIGH, N.C. – December 15, 2016– Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, the company’s massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. Based on the upstream OpenStack ‘Newton’ release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives new features that increase system-wide scalability, ease infrastructure management, and improve orchestration, while also enhancing network performance and platform security. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a new software life cycle, with optional support up to 5 years.
Hundreds of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid and private clouds for a variety of mission-critical deployments, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; Swisscom; UKCloud; and Verizon. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of certified partners, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace, and NetApp for enterprise businesses, as well as Ericsson, Nokia, NEC, Huawei, Cisco and others from the telecommunications industry.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 delivers a reliable cloud platform built on the proven, enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Integrated with Red Hat’s hardened OpenStack community code, Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance, or IT security requirements. Also included in Red Hat OpenStack Platform is Red Hat CloudForms, a hybrid cloud management and monitoring platform to oversee not only OpenStack infrastructure components but also the workloads running on a given OpenStack cloud. Additionally, 64 TBs of storage capacity is provided with Red Hat Ceph Storage, enabling users to better evaluate the flexible, massively scalable properties of Ceph’s leading storage solution for OpenStack environments.
New enhancements and updates to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 include:
· A more streamlined user experience driven by an easier-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) reduces the complexities of installation and management. Designed for production use, the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director GUI provides several newly integrated functions, such as automatic upgrades and updates (including Ceph), advanced networking configuration, high availability, and the option to deploy file sharing via the Manila service, using the integrated drivers available from NetApp and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
· Improved flexibility for greater scalability through the introduction of customizable services and administration roles using Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. Cloud operators are now able to control their OpenStack environment at a more granular level by customizing OpenStack services to run and scale independently of each other. This offers greater flexibility when deploying services to match individual organizations’ unique workload requirements.
· Greater data assurance through new security-related enhancements, such as improved high availability (HA) for large scale deployments. Additionally, optional object storage encryption and ephemeral security tokens improve security measures and lower risk of data access due to theft.
· Improved performance for network-intensive workloads through the new data plane developer kit (DPDK) component of Open vSwitch, and single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), results in network performance that is comparable to bare metal. Additionally, network routing is now more flexible and faster, allowing customers to choose between centralized routing or distributed routing (DVR).
· A new “ready state” hardware certification program, based on OpenStack Ironic. While Red Hat already supports certified hardware plug-ins for several OpenStack components, the new program is designed to expand the ecosystem of hardware options for automated bare-metal configuration. Dell EMC is the first Red Hat partner to be certified for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 ready-state, with several more coming soon.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 also introduces distributed continuous integration (DCI) to key partners, such as Dell EMC, NEC, and Rackspace. This collaborative approach to testing can help partners more effectively prepare for new Red Hat OpenStack Platform releases, and provide customers with greater stability and higher quality cloud solutions that have been tested many times over with their uniquely integrated cloud system than previously offered.
New lifecycle offers up to 5 years support
To help customers achieve long-term stability required by their specific workload requirements, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a dual support life cycle model that offers greater subscription flexibility for mission-critical operations. This new model gives customers the option of standardizing on a new “Long Life” version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, offering a three year product lifecycle and optional two additional years of extended life cycle (ELS) support available for purchase. Customers can also choose to focus on consuming new feature functionality by using rolling upgrades to follow the latest releases of Red Hat OpenStack Platform every six months to one year.
Long Life versions of Red Hat OpenStack Platform will be offered every third release, starting with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10. Versions in between will include one year of life cycle support.
Supporting Quotes
Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat
“In just a few short years, OpenStack has moved from simply being an ‘innovation’ for proofs-of-concept and R&D testbeds to a foundation for mission-critical private cloud deployments, used by hundreds of enterprises and major telecommunication providers alike to power production operations. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives the enterprise-readiness of OpenStack by delivering a stable, reliable and open foundation for cloud deployments, delivering new innovations like composable services and roles while retaining our commitment to enterprise stability, highlighted by our new Long Life support model.”
Lew Tucker, vice president, Cloud CTO, Cisco
“As one of Red Hat’s most committed OpenStack partners, Cisco works closely with Red Hat and the community to drive industry-leading cloud technology platforms, better enabling our enterprise and service provider customers to gain the benefits of an open cloud computing platform. Based on the latest ‘Newton’ OpenStack release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 provides significant improvements in networking performance, stability, and scalability. We look forward to helping our customers to succeed on their journey to hybrid cloud.”
Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, Validated Solutions and HPC, Dell EMC Converged Platforms and Solution Division
“Dell EMC and Red Hat’s close engineering and collaboration efforts continue to help our joint customers to quickly deploy and manage OpenStack powered clouds. We are pleased to have worked closely with Red Hat to both refine and build the new distributed continuous integration partner testing process which accelerates both code testing, validation and the ability to deliver robust software to customers. Red Hat’s new OpenStack Platform 10 lifecycle model for support will also offer more subscription flexibility for mission-critical operations and strengthens our joint ability to support customers throughout the entire lifecycle of their OpenStack deployments.”
Kenji Kaneshige, director of development department, Linux Development Division, Fujitsu
“Fujitsu and Red Hat have been working together over 10 years in open source software development and successfully supported Mission critical/Enterprise workloads. And now Fujitsu works hand-in-hand with Red Hat to drive several features needed by global enterprises in the upstream OpenStack project. We are so pleased to see the upstream development results delivering a more efficient and advanced cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service through Fujitsu Integrated System PRIMEFLEX Family.”
Bryan Thompson, general manager, OpenStack Private Cloud, Rackspace
“The developments included in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 make it faster and easier for our customers and partners to adopt OpenStack. Forrester Research recently reported that more than half of all Fortune 100 companies use OpenStack, which means these deployments must be scalable, agile and intuitive. The new platform from Red Hat delivers improved performance capabilities and deeper integration with the latest Community projects and code. All of that, combined with support from Rackspace, means enterprise customers using Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat will have even more confidence in OpenStack for their managed cloud needs.”
Additional Resources
· Learn more about Red Hat OpenStack Platform
· Read a blog post about life cycle support for Red Hat OpenStack Platform
· Attend a webinar about what’s new with Red Hat OpenStack Platform
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About Red Hat, Inc.
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